Conventionally, there was offered means for recording information sensed by a sensor in an image device and the setting information set by a user along with a moving image, and enabling the moving image to be retrieved, reproduced or printed based on the information, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-99605, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-200632, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-298849, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-350234, and Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-358206. For example, ON or OFF state and the magnifying power of the digital zoom described as the digital zoom information are utilized for retrieving a frame which has been magnified at a predetermined digital zoom power, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-99605.
However, even if the image device is operated in the same manner, the image quality obtained as a result of the process may be varied due to a difference in the processing method. For example, in the digital zoom, it is common practice that a part of an image captured by the image pickup element is cut out and enlarged. With this method, in enlargement, insufficient pixels are interpolated from neighboring pixels, resulting in degraded image quality. However, a method of preventing the degradation in the image quality that is caused by an interpolation process of pixels was proposed (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-67032). Also, there is an image device in which the digital zoom system is changed depending on the magnifying power. In this way, with the different processing method, there occurs a difference in the image quality after the digital zoom process. And if the information regarding the image quality caused by a difference in the processing method is utilized in printing the frame image, for example, it is possible to avoid printing the frames of bad image quality. With the prior techniques, however, only the information sensed by the sensor and the setting information set by the user could be described as the additive information, and therefore, the utilization of image quality as discussed above (or determination of the image quality) was impossible.